An engaging account of the thousands of women in hundreds of communities across France who combined the traditional life of monastics with a new calling to provide education to women.

A Social History of the Cloister is a study of life in teaching convents across France through two hundred years of history, a history that provided the beginnings and inspiration for most of today's institutions for the Catholic education of girls.

In The Social History of the Cloister Elizabeth Rapley goes beyond the monastic rulebooks, legal and notarial records, and memoirs of famous women who passed through monastery doors to the chronicles, letters, and other little-known writings produced by nuns for and about themselves. Working from these accounts, Rapley is able to provide a far more complex picture of women who, as a whole, were much less otherworldly than the older convent literature would have us believe, much less thwarted and unhappy than their detractors have long maintained, and much less irrelevant than some historians have assumed. She chips away at the dehumanizing stereotypes that have often been used to describe these nuns to show the essential humanity of these women.

"A serious advance in state-of-the-art research. Rapley's scholarship is exceedingly sound. She thinks in such stimulating and logical ways that the exercise is never tedious, always intellectually challenging and, above all, interesting ... The extent of the research is prodigious and Rapley is so familiar with her vast documentation that she's been able to construct a new and more comprehensive interpretation than has previously been imagined of the nature of the social life of women's monasteries under the ancien regime." D. Gillian Thompson, Department of History, University of New Brunswick "A very good synthesis of female religious life." Craig Harline, Department of History, Brigham Young University“A work of exhaustive scholarship which succeeds, too, in being a wonderful read.” Times Literary Supplement“Straightforward, free of jargon, and clearly and gracefully written throughout.” Choice

Elizabeth Rapley is adjunct professor of history at the University of Ottawa, and the author of The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France.

Illustrations Introduction

PART ONE: TWO HUNDRED YEARSI The Nuns and Their World 2 For Richer, for Poorer: The Monastic System and the Economy 3 The Dilemmas of Obedience 4 "Personae non gratae": Jansenist Nuns in the Wake of Unigenitus5 The Decline of the Monasteries 6 Aftermath

PART TWO: THE ANATOMY OF THE CLOISTER7 Clausura and Community 8 The Three Pillars of Monasticism: Poverty, Chastity, Obedience 9 Prehistories10 Novices II "The Servants of the Brides of Christ" 12 Of Death and Dying 13 The lnstitut 14 The Pensionnat

Conclusion Appendix: Demographics of the Cloister Glossary Notes Bibliography Index A map of the three teaching congregations